I'm just going through a similar painful process with Lyx 1.6.8 and LyxWinInstaller. I certainly appreciate the efforts of the LyxWinInstaller developers, but I do think there is a big problem with the current version-- and it doesn't warn you properly.
My story is this. I have existing Lyx 1.6.7 and Miktex installations that work absolutely fine together. I want to upgrade Lyx to 1.6.8. Because I was worried that the standard LyX installer might decide to re-install Miktex from scratch or something like that (I can't remember whether it actually does, but I didn't want to find out the hard way), I tried WinInstaller instead-- I thought it would be quicker. Because I hadn't used it before, I chose the "Small" variant. The WinInstaller webpage seems to say it won't try to re-install Miktex if it doesn't have to, but WinInstaller still decided it needed to update 100s of Miktex packages. From Germany! (I live in Australia. I have no idea where I last installed Miktex packages from, so I trusted the box that said "use same place as last time (Germany)?"... which it clearly) It's going to take about 5 hours, and there are scary warnings on this thread about what will happen if I just stop the process. This time, I'll probably be lucky: work pays for the download, it's morning so I don't need to turn the computer off overnight, and the connection probably won't go down over the 5-hour period. None of these need be true if I am at home (so I guess I will avoid WinInstaller altogether on my home machine). For something this slow, I don't think "just wait until it finishes" is OK advice. >From what little I can remember of the last time I installed a new Lyx version with the standard installer, the whole process was much quicker, whether or not it actually did re-install Miktex. (It was still slow enough that I wanted an alternative that didn't fiddle with Miktex, but not this one...) So... some questions/requests! Is this extremely slow process going to happen again if I use WinInstaller in "update" mode next time? Is there any way to tell WinInstaller, "don't bother to update every single miktex package ever written-- I'll wait for that to happen during normal Lyx usage, if & when a package is actually needed"? [Since I already had a perfectly good Miktex installation for my Lyx needs.] Can the introductory documentation please warn that "just saying yes" is going to lead to an incredible delay? [Maybe it's there already, but it wasn't obvious to me.] Again, I do appreciate the efforts, and probably there is something simple that the developers can do to fix it -- but I am currently wishing I hadn't used WinInstaller! thanks Mark Bravington mark dot bravington at csiro dot au CSIRO Marine Lab Hobart Tas 7001 Australia
